An interesting talk on the history of init and systemd across various different flavors of unix. Touches on software history, how things end up the way they are, and how we respond to change. I am not immersed in this particular unix community, but this talk does a good job of hinting at the later contours of that community.

Personal diffrences about CLI user exprience asside, Psalm looks like a solid static analysis tool for PHP codebases. “Static analysis” meaning it looks at your entire codebase and tells you about things that might be problems. It’s a great example of how the work that’s gone in the PHP parser over the past four [...]

I cam across this surprisingly cogent explanation of what SELinux linux is, including a bit of history about where it came from. There’s probably a paper to be written about the various attempts to improve and build on top of the simple-yet-complex chmod/chown/chgrp permissions scheme at the heart of unix. This video isn’t [...]

As a rule I avoid entrepreneuria-media. There’s a sameness to the over confidant young sounding, white sounding voice these men choose to adopt that leaves me squicked out at best, and after a while you realize the way to have a career and life with some level of independence is to leave the media behind and start doing the work. [...]

This entry is part 5 of 6 in the series Just Enough C for PHP. Earlier posts include Just Enough C for PHP, Just Enough C for PHP: Running C Programs, Just Enough C for PHP: Variables and Types, and Just Enough C for PHP: C Macros. Later posts include Just Enough C for PHP: Make Basics. First, some business. It’s worth saying out [...]

I’ve been doing more backend NodeJS programming recently and I was pleasantly surprised to discover something new about a programming language I’ve been using for for over 20 years. Although, to be fair, the callback syntax I was asking about callSomeFunction(function heyLookANameForMyFunction(){ }); wasn’t valid in [...]

This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series Sylius for Magento and PHP Developers. Earlier posts include Five First Impressions of the Sylius eCommerce System, Symfony's Service Container, Symfony: Autowiring Services, A Brief Look at Every Symfony Service Configuration, and Symfony Routes and Stand Alone Controllers. Later posts include [...]

This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series Sylius for Magento and PHP Developers. Earlier posts include Five First Impressions of the Sylius eCommerce System, Symfony's Service Container, Symfony: Autowiring Services, and A Brief Look at Every Symfony Service Configuration. Later posts include Symfony Routing Configuration Keys, and Basic [...]

If you liked the video from the last quickies post you may also enjoy Asynchrony: Under the Hood, a talk from @codebytere that covers similar territory. The presentation style is a bit more formal, but that suits the density of the information being transmitted. You get the event loop, the microtask queue, and an overview of generators [...]

This JSConf talk describes Javascript’s event loop in greater detail than the average javascript programmer typically needs to worry about. If you want to up your javascript game and understand why code X seems to run faster than code Y, this is a good place to start.

Fearless Security: Memory Safety is a broad overview of some ways the Rust programming language improves on memory management and race conditions in languages like C or C++ without going full handwave/don’t worry your pretty head about that we’ll manage everything for you. As I’ve gotten more real world experience with [...]

While this isn’t a straight up decorator tutorial, it does describe a practical application of the pattern which (unlike most of the decorator pattern documentation I’ve read) is a decent way of getting your head around the who/what/where/when/why of this pattern, particularly if you’re interested in Symfony’s [...]

I’m not sure I completely understand what Twitter Cards are — “frozen caveman developer who has drifted away from publishing software, etc.”. I tend to think of them as the stuff Twitter automatically adds to a tweet when you include a link. One thing I do know about Twitter Cards is if you accidentally publish [...]

I’m not sure I completly understand what Twitter Cards are — “frozen caveman developer who has drifted away from publishing software” and all that. I tend to think of them as the stuff twitter automatically adds to a tweet when you include a link. I have recently learned though if you accidently publish something [...]

This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Sylius for Magento and PHP Developers. Earlier posts include Five First Impressions of the Sylius eCommerce System, Symfony's Service Container, and Symfony: Autowiring Services. Later posts include Symfony Routes and Stand Alone Controllers, Symfony Routing Configuration Keys, and Basic and [...]

This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series Sylius for Magento and PHP Developers. Earlier posts include Five First Impressions of the Sylius eCommerce System, and Symfony's Service Container. Later posts include A Brief Look at Every Symfony Service Configuration, Symfony Routes and Stand Alone Controllers, Symfony Routing Configuration [...]

This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series Sylius for Magento and PHP Developers. Earlier posts include Five First Impressions of the Sylius eCommerce System. Later posts include Symfony: Autowiring Services, A Brief Look at Every Symfony Service Configuration, Symfony Routes and Stand Alone Controllers, Symfony Routing Configuration Keys, [...]

Another year, another small bug fix release for Commerce Bug. This one takes care of some PHP 7.2 syntax errors (Object is no longer allowed as class name portion) and a slew of weird edge cases where Magento’s event/observer system would send through data that should be an object, but was not an object. It’s unclear if the [...]

Blog as bookmarks again — this Visual Representation of SQL Joins contains a number of useful visualizations for how joins work in SQL. I’ve been carrying around a print out of one of the images for over a decade and this post will let me recycle one more piece of paper.

I’ve long used OS X and MacOS’s command line say command as a “read that back to me” proof reading tool. Unfortunatly, in recent Mac OS release say can be a bit flakey and I’ve had to look for substitutes. I don’t know much about the folks behind it, but mimic been working out OK for me. The voices [...]